Frontier®
ArchitectureHow It All Fits Together

The Frontier
Grid Platform is the collection of software used
to manage our online Parabon
Computation Grid utility HPC service. Packaged as
Frontier
Enterprise, it is the same solution we deploy for
organizations wanting an in-house private grid. It's secure,
OS-agnostic, unobtrusive and comes with a rich set of development tools
to facilitate the rapid development of high-performance grid
applications.

Frontier Grid Server:
The Frontier
Grid Server,
which provides Frontier Grid Services to users and developers, is at
the center of any Frontier grid. It's a highly configurable component
that
listens for jobs from Frontier-powered applications, monitors the
availability of Frontier Compute Engines,
and schedules tasks across the grid, transparently handling
the inevitable failure of any network or computing resource.

Frontier Compute Engine:
Finally, the Frontier
Compute
Engine is the provider-side application that runs
on each grid node (computer) to actually perform the work. The Compute
Engine is designed to be unobtrusive — only executing tasks
when the
computer is otherwise idle.

Frontier
Dashboard:
The Frontier
Dashboard™ is a browser-based web interface that
provides an
intuitive front-end to the Frontier Grid Platform, including access to
our App Store — a collection of
Software as a Service
applications which run on Frontier.

Frontier
Applications:
We offer a number of ready-to-use grid applications
— across a wide variety of domains from data mining to
modeling & simulation —
as well as a rich suite of developer
tools (below)
to easily adapt legacy apps to run on Frontier.

We offer Frontier
Rapids™,
our Integration and Execution Environment, which allows users to
rapidly
integrate existing applications with Frontier,
and frameworks such as the Origin™
Evolutionary SDK
libraries for providing evolutionary optimization using genetic
algorithms and evolutionary strategies.

The JumpStart™Grid Software as a Service
Application Generator enables developers to very quickly stand up
web-based, grid-powered applications and run them from within the
Frontier Dashboard — in less than 10 minutes!

What follows is a more detailed discussion of how these
components fit together.

An In-Depth Look

We start with the "heart and soul" of the Frontier Grid
Platform - the Frontier Grid Server. It
schedules tasks, coordinates compute and data resources, and guarantees
task execution, even in the presence of unreliable nodes.

The public Parabon
Computation Grid connects systems
around the world, and provides the most scalable Computation on Demand®
solution available.

By contracting with businesses and universities around
the world, Parabon provides an "always on" compute grid, capable of
running massively parallel HPC jobs any time, day or night.

In addition, by keeping excess capacity on reserve at
all times, the Parabon Computation Grid provides tremendous
scalability,
allowing researchers to boost performance in order to speed discovery
and dramatically reduce the time it takes to perform mission-critical
calculations and simulations.

Organizations and agencies unwilling (or unable) to utilize
public resources can still harness the power of their own computers
—
on their own secure networks — by
installing the Frontier
Enterprise software in-house.

Frontier makes it easy to capture the computational
capacity of your existing IT infrastructure, and leverage those
resources to run your own HPC applications internally.

Also, a Frontier Enterprise solution allows for
unlimited
usage of
an organization's compute engines, making it well suited for very
long-running applications — for example, those lasting for
months at a
time.

The Frontier Enterprise software ships as a VMware or
Xen-compatible
Virtual
Appliance, allowing organizations to deploy
Frontier in as little as 15 minutes!Watch the video.

In addition, the Frontier server is, itself, scalable.
A single
instance can easily handle more than 1000 nodes, but as the size of
your
grid increases, the load can easily be divided among multiple
grid servers.

The Frontier Dashboard is an
easy-to-use web interface for
launching and monitoring Frontier applications.

Software engineers who are comfortable with the Eclipse
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) will feel right at home
creating custom applications using our full-featured Frontier plugin.

Not only do we provide comprehensive API documentation,
but we provide tools which enable developers to launch their jobs, and
monitor/debug them in real time, both on a Frontier Grid or within a
locally executable Frontier grid simulator.

Developers wishing to integrate the Frontier Grid
Platform into their own products directly can download the SDK for free.

The SDK includes sample grid programs, tutorials, and
full API documentation, as well as the libraries and Java ".jar" files
which implement those APIs.

Frontier
Rapids™
is an
integration and execution environment (IEE) for rapidly deploying
existing applications across Frontier.

Users simply drop their binary or jar file into a
Rapids Runtime directory, customize a Rapids Configuration File and
experience the power of Frontier faster than they imagined possible.
Many existing applications can run on Rapids with no code changes!

Also, its job management commands provide applications
with the range of control over Frontier that users expect from a fully
integrated Frontier application.

By integrating these various pieces, Parabon has developed a
comprehensive grid platform, capable of supporting non-technical
end-users, as well as seasoned application developers. The Frontier
Grid Platform is a revolutionary grid solution that is transforming the
very nature of high performance computing.

Frontier 5!The
Nexus of
Grid & Cloud Computing

Frontier JumpStart™ Video

About to buy hardware?

Better think twice. Instead of a Linux cluster or some other
high-performance solution, get more computation for less money with
Frontier. Our utility grid supports individual computers and scheduling
across multiple clusters.